Side Hustle Holiday Charity Raffle: A Give Story

Payment Gateways

These articles describe the payment gateways that Give comes with. Give comes with PayPal Standard, Test Donations, and Offline Donations in the free plugin. This section describes each of those in detail.

Articles in this Section:

What is a Payment Gateway?

Payment Gateways are methods by which you can collect donations on your site with the Give plugin. But the purpose of a “Gateway” is to keep all of the private donor information safe and secure. This means specifically that a Gateway’s main purpose is to send your donors sensitive information (specifically credit card information) encrypted to the payment processor (like PayPal or Stripe, etc.) without saving it on your site at all.

Why is this important? You do not want to be responsible for credit card information — ever. Storing that information requires a very significant amount of responsibility and liability. If you are a small organization, that kind of liability could sink you quickly. So instead of storing that information, payment processors (like PayPal or Stripe, etc) connect with your site and that information is sent directly to them without ever touching your server.

How do I Enable a Specific Payment Gateway?

Out of the box, Give comes with three Payment Gateways: PayPal Standard, Test Donations, and Offline Donations. To enable any of all of them simply go to “Donations > Settings” and then the “Payment Gateways” tab and check off the ones you want enabled in the “Enable Gateways” section.

Enabling and Customizing Gateways in Give Settings

If you have a premium Add-on Payment Gateway (like PayPal Pro, or Stripe, etc) those will appear in this list as well after you activate the Add-on.

Here you will also see the ability to change the labels of the payment gateway on the front end of the form. This is to help clarify which payment gateway the donor would like to use.

You can also drag the payment gateways into whichever order you like, which will be reflected on all your forms. Make sure to hit “Save” after re-ordering.

How can I accept Credit Cards Directly on my Website?

Give also supports a growing amount of premium payment gateway offerings which allow you to accept donations via credit card directly on your website. These are premium Add-ons. You can see all of our Premium Payment Gateway Add-ons here.